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In today’s podcast we are helping CJ and Shelley Hitz take their online business to the next level.
Jocelyn met Shelley at a conference and became fast friends. Now we’re very excited to learn more about their business and help them take it to that next level.
You will also learn how:
- A little bit about their publishing business and why they want to focus on it
- How to find better life balance as their business takes off
- How to narrow down their niche and what to focus on in the beginning
- The best way to launch a podcast
- How to get more opt-ins for your email list
- Tips and insight on throwing your own live event and price tiers
- What to focus on when you are creating a signature digital product
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Learn more about self publishing with Shelley here
- Live events can transform your business. Come to ours in San Diego this March. Only 1 spot left!
- Learn more about self publishing on Kindle with this quick Q&A
- Gain more life balance with our tips in this episode
- Flip Your Life eCourse
- Want to be on our Flipped Podcast? Apply Here!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, on today’s podcast, we help CJ and Shelley Hitz take their online business to the next level. [spoiler]
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Super excited today because we have another Flipped Podcast coming your way. This is where we bring on audience members and we help them in real time with their online business. We do this instead of interviewing experts. We don’t like to help millionaires promote books. We like to help people. We like to bring people on and see what they are doing and see if we can help them get to the next level. Jocelyn is going to introduce our guests today.
JOCELYN: All right, I am super excited today to be bringing on CJ and Shelley Hitz. I met Shelley at a conference back in October.
SHANE: Go to those live events, people. That’s where you meet people at. We keep telling you that. This is proof.
JOCELYN: We became best friends. She is an awesome gal and I’m really excited to talk to them today and find out more about their business. CJ and Shelley, go ahead and tell us a little bit about your business. I know it has many aspects so tell us a little bit about that and about yourselves.
SHELLEY: Thank you so much for having us and it is so awesome to be with you guys and it is so true, go to live events. They transformed my business at the end of last year and it is so important. I’ll have CJ kind of start off and just share a little bit of our background. We have done a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
CJ: Yeah, so we’ve been married for over 16 years now and we’ve been involved with things from youth ministry to serving in the country of Belize, Central America for two years as short-term missionaries to doing a lot of speaking together in churches, camps, schools around the country sharing different Christian messages as well as Shelley has had opportunities to share things along the author lines. We’ve also written books together. We’ve been writing books together since, what was it, 2008 maybe?
SHELLEY: Yeah, I published my first book in 2008 and we were wanting to do more ministry together and just be able to work together more full time, and I was at that time working full time as a physical therapist. So we just thought, “Okay, how can we gradually work me out of my job?” We thought we were going to be full time speakers, traveling around in a little Toyota RV. Seriously, we bought the little Toyota RV.
SHANE: That’s awesome.
SHELLEY: Yeah, we rented out our house, like, we were all in, and so we got out on the road and all the speaking engagements stopped. It was so confusing where I’m like, “God, I quit my job. What am I suppose to do now?” That’s when things flipped for us and in 2012, we put a focus on publishing instead of speaking since we didn’t have speaking engagements at the time and we published. I just figured it out the other day, in 2012, we published 23 books.
SHANE: Wow.
SHELLEY: That’s when things really changed for us and from there then I used what I learned to go into author coaching. It has just been a wild ride.
SHANE: Do you publish these books like on Kindle? Are they digital books, are they self published or are some of them traditionally published? What are those books? How did you end up publishing?
CJ: They are all self published. We formed, our business name is Body and Soul Publishing LLC and so everything is under that banner. We’ve put all of our books on Kindle and then there are a lot of our books that are also in print format through CreateSpace.
SHELLEY: We also have audio books and some of our books are in other e-book platforms as well. We have a lot of different streams of income that come in each month.
JOCELYN: Okay, great. Which of your businesses, I know that you have several different things going on right now. Which one are we going to focus on today?
SHELLEY: Today, we’re going to focus on in the author coaching because that’s really what we’re focusing on this year is just building more income and just to be able to help more authors in that way.
SHANE: So you want to teach people to self publish, get their book out there, get it seen, get it published and all that, and how to draw an income? Are you making a full time income off your books right now? How do you pay your bills right now?
CJ: I would say our book royalties probably make up half to two-thirds of our full time income and then the other would come through affiliates, some of the coaching opportunities we have. I actually am getting into the coaching realm through my own website which is TrainWellRaceWell.com. I’m an avid runner, competitive runner. I’ve picked up a few sponsors and also just getting into the realm of coaching. I actually have my first paid client I’m going to be meeting with here this afternoon. A guy that wants to break three hours running the Pikes Peak Ascent this next August. It’s kind of cool.
SHANE: We got a lot of calls from people who are just starting out online but it sounds like you guys may had some success in different areas, making money in the internet. It sounds like you worked independently so like why do you want to flip your life with your author coaching, Shelley? What is your passion behind that and what is your reason for wanting to go this direction if you already kind of making money in some other areas?
SHELLEY: We have been working full time. It has been a little bit like over three years, maybe three and a half years. I quit my job in September 2011. So we’ve been doing this full time but to be very honest, it has been day to day, month to month, and it has just been survival mode. So we’re ready to get out of survival mode and to be able to have the time freedom to do other things and we really feel called to do ministry and to have other outreaches that’s volunteer work that we really don’t have time to do right now because we are just simply trying to pay the bills.
JOCELYN: Right, yeah that really makes sense and I think that resonates with a lot of people out there who are doing kind of the same thing. Let’s go ahead and get into your questions. What is your first question for us?
CJ: First question is how do we find better life balance as we grow our business? It feels like we’re working all the time especially working at home.
JOCELYN: Yeah this is a tough one and we talk about this actually a lot because we still get this question all the time. It is difficult. It’s hard for us too and even though we have been doing this a long time, we still struggle with this from time to time. The way that we’ve found that makes our life work the best is to calendar. Shelley and I actually talked about this. We have little Facebook conversations all the time but I like to calendar everything. It sounds a little crazy. Some people might be like, “Oh well, that isn’t a very fun life if you have already on the calendar,” but for me, it helps because it really compartmentalizes things.
I put my life first, things that I want to do or things that I need to do, like with my family, my kids, my friends, or whatever the case may be. I put those in first and then we schedule around our times of work. When we’re having that family time, we really, really, really try not to have any kind of technology – no phones, no computers. We’re not perfect at this and we still do mess it up from time to time but we really try to do that. We’ve taken all notifications off of our phones. The only notification that we get is like a text message and that’s only for like emergency kind of purposes, but otherwise, we take all notifications off, all messenger services, all of that and we just focus on the task at hand.
SHANE: And there is a lot of work to do, we understand it. Even when we had full time jobs, we were working, we would go to work at 7, we would get home at like 5:30 or 6. We still knew that those blocks were missing so we just kind of ignored those and we schedule that other free time first. We scheduled like time with Isaac and Anna, time with each other in the blocks that we knew we had available. So even though you probably got a lot of things in motion right now, you’ve got to keep going because you said you were kind of in survival mode, you’ve got to pay the bills, you’ve got to do certain work each day. Look at the blocks of time that you know are available and schedule those first for each other, for family, and have that better life balance. I think people get confused. They want six hours with family time, six hours with work, six hours with sleep, six hours with self, you know. One hour with your kids that’s extremely focused or 30 minutes with each other that is extremely distraction free is life balance. Sometimes that is as good as just being together for four or five hours.
Like last night, Isaac was home sick yesterday with strep throat and we kept him home from school. We kept Anna here too because we didn’t know if she was getting sick and we didn’t want her to get the babysitter sick. So we had both the kids here. They kind of did their own thing for most of the day. We hadn’t really got to talk to them a lot so what we did was, we just said, “Let’s get in the car and let’s go drive. We’ll just drive around with no technology.” You can even do that with each other, like if you’re working together all day, you don’t really get to talk to each other because Shelley, you’re working on a book, CJ, maybe you’re working on your running and things like that, making these plans for people and helping them succeed but then you’re like, “Oh my gosh, it’s 7:30 and we haven’t said a word to each other all day.” Maybe just get in the car for 30 minutes and go to the post office, go to the store together, those things can be life balance. It doesn’t always have to be like a perfect situation.
JOCELYN: What I find is that if I really strictly schedule things out that I’m a lot more focused during the times I’m supposed to be working. If I only have one hour to get something done, then I’m really going to work at it. I’m not going to be like chatting with Shelley on Facebook or with Jessica or whatever. I’m going to be really focused on what I have to do and get it done. I find that people a lot of times try to multitask and we as people are generally not very good multitaskers.
SHANE: One more last thing on this too, I think as entrepreneurs, we feel like if we’re not working, we’re failing, and that gets into a bad habit of just working to work. You know what I mean? Like last night, we had like five or six emails, we felt like a couple of them were critical. We got them later in the afternoon and we looked at it and we’re like, “Man, this is bad. This is bad,” but we’re like, “Yeah, but if it waits 12 hours so we can eat and sleep, is it going to make a difference?” Really, no, that’s not true. You don’t have to be working all the time.
If you stopped today and pick it up tomorrow, you got to learn to kind of let that “work all the time” mentality go because that’s what really bleeds into that work life balance is when we feel like as entrepreneurs, “Our whole business is going to collapse around us if we take 20 minutes off,” and really, that’s not going to happen. Sometimes you just got to kind of let that go and maybe even just set yourself a stopping point everyday where 6 o’clock, we don’t do anything after 6 o’clock. We can’t or we’ll go crazy.” That might be a good strategy to use too.
SHELLEY: Yeah, those are all good, good reminders and tips. There have been things that I personally have been implementing and just trying to see what works best. I just got back from vacation but I am going to consider the scheduling thing that Jocelyn, I’m very persistent too like because I love having my freedom but I think having the schedule will give me freedom. Kind of like a budget, when you budget then it gives you freedom to buy what you want because you have the money there but, yeah, I just need to change my mind set in them.
SHANE: Too much freedom is a bad thing too.
SHELLEY: Right.
SHANE: We actually heard a podcast once where this couple was on there and they like scheduled times where they were allowed to meet together during the day. They actually like, “I can fit you in at 6:30,” and they would meet for dinner and then they would go do their own things. We don’t go that far but the scheduling does help you kind of organize all these stuff. Awesome, what’s your second question, guys?
SHELLEY: So with the new author coaching that we have going on, we have done a lot of strategizing to decide what the main problem we will solve is and something that is profitable where there’s a target market willing to pay for it. Right now, our direction is the brand name is called Author Audience and the direction is Kindle Publishing. Instead of focusing on people who are already authors, focus on business owners, speakers, ministry leaders, etc. who have a message to share and want to reach more people but also want to grow their business. I’ve been very successful at doing that through Kindle and so to teach them that, but we’re just at the very beginning point. So I just want to know if you have any other suggestions for narrowing our focus, for really getting into what problem to solve, and that sort of thing.
SHANE: I think that Kindle Publishing in itself is a pretty narrow niche. I think that’s good enough where there’s a lot of people, like you said, out there with a message that want to publish on Kindle or they’ve got an idea for a book and maybe they don’t want to create the whole website, everything around it yet so they just want to get it into the Amazon market place. I think that’s pretty narrow but what you need early on is you need a focus group that you can really get in with, that you’re close to that you understand to get a few testimonials, to get a few success stories built on your coaching platform. What you all are doing so much in the Christian ministry and things like that.
I wonder if you couldn’t reach out to some pastors, some youth ministries, some other missionaries. That way, you’re kind of combining a passion plus your expertise and really focus on a niche like that to get those success stories, to help people in something maybe you’ve written about or you’ve done. You really understand it and then once you’ve kind of got those processes down perfect, you can kind of open that up to broader audience where it’s more generally how to get your book on to Kindle but at first, you could really focus on those pastors and ministers.
One thing that kind of grew out of Flipped Lifestyle that we were shocked with is Flipped Lifestyle was a very general thing. We wanted to teach people how to create digital products and sell them online. I’m a football coach and Jocelyn is a librarian. Those are pretty opposite spheres so we thought this would be very general but it’s amazing how many teachers have resonated with our story and have reached out to us to ask how to get their lesson plans online or other coaches, “how do I get my playbook or my drills online?” Things like that. So you might want to focus narrow for maybe the first few months, get you a few case studies in, and then turn that product into a more like general coaching package to open it up to everybody else.
SHELLEY: Yeah, that’s a good thought and what we’re doing right now too is we formed a private Facebook group for business owners that want to keep Christ the focus. So it’s a private thing and then we’re planning some books on that topic as well. So we’re hoping to gather a group of people that resonate with us that are business owners that have a message to share and that could maybe even where we have some of the focus group come out of.
JOCELYN: I think that’s a great idea. That’s a perfectly niched down audience and they are already familiar with you. I think they would definitely take that next step, some of the people in there. I think that’s good.
SHANE: A lot of people say, “Follow your passions and your dreams and many will follow.” That’s not really true. That will keep you going but if your passion doesn’t make any money, it doesn’t matter. Most of the time, we believe that people are better off to go with their expertise but in this case, you’ve already got an expertise. You know how to self publish, you’ve been pretty successful at it, and you’ve got that passion for ministry, business owners, Christians, and things like that. You can combine the two and that’s really going to niche down far enough where you’ve got your expertise going, you’ve got what you love going, and you’re going to be relating to these people and that’s going to keep you driven through your coaching process until you’re ready to expand out to more general business owners. Does that make sense?
SHELLEY: Yeah, it does.
JOCELYN: Okay. So let’s go on to question number three.
CJ: All right, so our plan is to launch a podcast soon, be the Author Audience show. This will help Shelley gain even more credibility in her field. The plan is to also mind map out each show and use the transcripts of the podcast as the foundation of her showcase book, any thoughts on the best way to launch the podcast?
JOCELYN: Okay. We haven’t talked to a whole lot about launching podcasts before and generally, we would tell people who are starting something like a new site not to start a podcast, but for Shelley, I think that actually is a good fit because Shelley is a very outgoing individual. She’s very good on audiovisual kind of things. I’ve seen her on video and I’ve heard some of her podcasts in the past. I think for you it is a good idea and that it would be a good tool to reach some more people in that audience.
SHANE: We tell people not to start podcasts because a lot of people try to get people to start podcasts so they can sell them their course about starting a podcast. It’s so overwhelming at first, like people get in there and they learn how to create a podcast and they don’t even have a product to sell. They don’t even have a website for the podcast to be hosted on yet and they are buying a $2,000 course about starting a podcast, but you already have products, you’ve got a history in this, and you can probably lead into that. I would say for launching the podcast in your situation, and this really goes for anybody who wants to start one, the first thing I would do is go ahead and record 10 episodes and launch all 10 of those in the same day. I would focus completely on the content first so you can get it done as fast as possible. I would batch those. I would record about three a day and try to do that over a 4-5 day period.
I’ve seen a lot of people try to do all 10 in one day and let me tell you something, episode 9 and 10 don’t sound very good because they are so tired, they are so worn out. So spread that out. Get them all launched, get them all out on the site that you’re creating as blog posts, set all that up, and have them all go out immediately. The reason you do that is because if you have one episode and you start promoting it and people see that, that could be a turnoff. If I see someone that’s only got one or two episodes, we get asked all the time to be on people’s podcasts that have not even started or they’ve only got one or two episodes. That immediately to us is a red flag because it looks like you’re just going to give up, you just started. We don’t know what the future holds for you but if you have 10 or 11 podcasts out there day one, when I go to see that, it looks like you’ve already created a bunch of content. It just looks more legit. Does that make sense?
SHELLEY: Yes, it does.
SHANE: The next thing I would do is I would promote that to any existing audience that you already have. Once all 10 of those are out, you can say, “Hey, I’ve got this podcast going.” There’s a lot of great episodes out and there’s a ton of content for there all ready for you to consume, that’s where you want to start promoting that to any existing audience that you already have.
JOCELYN: As far as your question about the book goes, I think that’s a good idea to use those transcripts. I mean, of course you want to clean them up a little bit but I also think maybe in the book, you could include maybe some case studies that are doing some of the things that you’re talking about in your podcast. I think that would make a really interesting story.
SHANE: You could do case studies like your show notes, right, you could talk about a topic in your podcast and then say, “I know someone who has done this.” Talk about it a little bit and say, “I’ve got a case study on my blog post that you can go back and look at, and that way, you can kind of do that content where at the end of it, you’re going to be ready to write that book. A lot of people do that. Michael Hyatt’s book, Platform, like his book is just a bunch of blog posts he has put together in order. Pat Flynn’s Food Truckr book, he created 50 blog posts or something like that but he wrote them like chapters of his Food Truckr book and then he put them together and sold it on his Food Truckr site. So that’s exactly what you’re doing here.
SHELLEY: Right and I was thinking the Mind Maps and the video of the Mind Map that I created because I would have a video and an audio portion could be like the content upgrade, like through a lead box for each podcast. They could then download the Mind Map that goes with that episode. So I was thinking of repurposing it that way too.
JOCELYN: Yeah I love that. I mean for you, I think that is absolutely a home run. I think that you could be really good in that medium.
SHANE: And I tell you another thing, one time a buddy of mine, we sat down and created a strategy to create content faster. I think we did a podcast about this but what we did was we said, “Let’s make a video” and so we’ve got the video information, right, and then “Let’s strip the audio and turn that into a podcast and then we’ll talk about four topics in the video. We’ll divide those up and get the transcripts and create four blog posts.” So we could record basically 25-30 minute video, and get podcasts and four blog posts out of it. Anytime that you can repurpose content like that, you’ve got to plan this up front. This needs to be detailed when you try to do this. You can just wing that. If you really create a good plan for that, then that’s going to be successful over the long term and I will say this about using that Mind Map as something like a lead magnet or an opt in generator, anytime you can create a new opt in for a piece of content that is directly related to that content, that is always going to get more email opt ins than just cold, “Get my 25-page e-book on this.” So that’s a great idea to get more opt ins over time as well.
SHELLEY: Right and because CJ and I both have experience as speakers, I’m very comfortable speaking and I’ve realized, I could write a book much faster if I mind map it, outline it, and then speak it and then have it transcribed and then edit it. I just feel like using the podcast and then using that material on my YouTube channel, my podcast, my blog, and for some of the content in my book, there will obviously be content that’s not published online in the book as well. It just made sense.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I think that that makes a lot of sense for you.
SHANE: That’s like our podcast. We don’t write blog posts for Flipped Lifestyle. We get like 45-50% of our traffic actually comes from Google like actual just keyword searches and we just transcribe everything. Our podcasts, our Q&As, that’s like 90% of the text on our blog but it produces about 50% of our traffic. That’s a very, very good solution for anybody out there that wants to do like audio or visual is take your transcripts, put them on there, and use that as your content and clean it up.
SHELLEY: We were talking, CJ and I, about the podcast and I’m using this Author Audience theme where it’s like you’re on a stage and you need to have an audience. You have a message but if you have an empty audience, it doesn’t do you any good. So it’s building your audience but getting your message to those people. So I have that stage theme and so part of the podcast I thought, “You know what, I’d like to have a segment,” kind of like what you guys do, your Can’t Miss Moments. I wanted to have some sort of segment and I think I’m going to do a backstage pass type segment which would be more like a case study. So I’d either share like something that’s working in my business or something like that’s working for one of my clients. So what you said about the case study fits just naturally in that idea as well.
JOCELYN: Yes, I think that will be perfect, that social proof is something that you’re really going to need as you’re trying to build this audience. I think we have time for maybe two more questions. Look through your list there and decide what you want to ask next.
SHELLEY: One of my other main goals for this year is to host my first live event locally. I’ve got some coaching and one of the things that they recommended to increase my credibility in my field was to host a live event. She said, “It doesn’t have to be big. It can be workshop style. It could be 20 people,” whatever but I want to do something live, record that, and everything, but I just want to see what advice you might have for live events. I know you guys have done a couple in the past.
JOCELYN: We have and they are a lot of fun. As far as profitability goes, I mean, they are not always the most profitable but it does do a lot in giving you like a good reputation and building people’s awareness of your brand and more importantly, just giving you that good social proof. The most perfect time to get a testimonial is at the end of a live event. People are really excited about what they have been doing and I usually offer some type of a small incentive to give me a video testimonial. “I’ll give a free product if you will record this video testimonial for me right now.” That is so important when you’re trying to sell things like on your website, just to have that, especially that video social proof. There’s something about video. I don’t know what it is but people just really, really resonate with it so I think that that will be a really good plan for you. I like the plan of doing it locally because it’s going to keep your cost down and I mean, you live over there close to Denver, right?
SHELLEY: Right.
JOCELYN: So you’re going to have like a really good location that people can get to easily and I think that the optimal time to start promoting something like that is after you started building your audience up a little bit. You’re going to have to have a little bit of an audience in order to get the live event out there but the other good thing about doing a live event is that you can target geographical areas like on Twitter, on Facebook through ads and so you can even get people who are maybe are not familiar with you to come to this live event or be interested in this live event as long as you market it the right way and us that language of like the benefits they are going to receive from attending that live event.
SHANE: I tell you another thing about live events too and this is a big tip for hosting the live event, don’t treat it like your speaking at a conference and don’t treat it like you’re in a school teaching people things. You have to be able to make those live events as interactive as possible so like our live events are usually like hot seat formats where we bring people up, we let them ask us questions kind of like we’re doing here on the podcast, and we get more specific information and they are involved, and we also like to get people at our live, because those are six-hour events.
If we got up there and just taught six things, like a training, well nobody likes to go trainings at work, why would you want to go to training for anything? It’s not like a conference where you’ve got different speakers come in every 20 minutes and that kind of keeps the energy flowing. So when you do your live event, you can do some of that training but make sure you’re making audience participation as interactive as possible and that way, you can get people involved and make sure that they have a really good time while at the live event.
SHELLEY: Yeah that’s a good point and I was thinking of doing it workshop style and maybe even having where they create their outline for their nonfiction book during that event. So they are actually getting some work done too and I can help them with that. I’m not exactly sure how it will all work out but I definitely want it to be interactive.
JOCELYN: Yeah I really like that you said that. Those are actually my next thought that I was going to say. I would love to see them come away with some type of a finished product even if it’s not their book, you know, but their outline will be fantastic.
SHANE: Also too, a live event is a great piggyback for a digital product. We have Flip Your Life and we’re working with Jill and Josh Stanton at Screw the Nine to Five to put a live event together and we’re like, “Man, I don’t want it to be just people showing up.” What we did was, we said, “Let’s do this. Let’s give them our courses.” So you’re going to create this course, to be a self published author and all these things, but that could be a great thing that you could have two options on your sales page. You could say, “Here’s my course for $200,” whatever and then you could say. “Here’s our live event that we’re going to have in Denver and you get the course plus the live event for whatever” especially for your first live event, you could use that course, make it like a premium option where not only do you get this awesome course, you’re going to learn how to do all these things, but I’m going to go help you follow it up live.”
Now, you can either do it as a launch live event like 10 people are going to get to come and I’m going to help you with module one where we create your outline for your e-book or you could even do it as an audit where you’re going to go through the course and do everything and then we come together and it’s like a self check, we audit each other’s work, we make sure everything is set up right, this won’t work in your system so we’re going to fix that for you while you’re here,” but now you’ve got some way to kind of play that with your product and that might be a better sell than just show up for a day and leave.
SHELLEY: Yeah, that was one of the things that someone had recommended to me is they do the same thing. They offer their course and then you get a ticket to their live event for free, so not everyone will come to the live event but anyone who gets the course can come if they want.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I like that idea and you can even tier it with like a course plus live event plus coaching. That could be your third tier that’s your big price out there. A lot of people do that and we also do that as well, so just something to think about on your pricing but I think that’s a great idea. Right, I think we have time for one more question so what will it be?
CJ: The main goal is to create income through a signature program where we help our target market write and publish a Kindle book then promote it through weekly or bi-weekly webinars, getting leads via Facebook ads and other means. What advice do you have for us about this?
SHANE: Okay, I think you’re doing a great thing about focusing on the one product and we’ve talked a lot about podcast and live events and that might be a little overwhelming to some people that are listening, but if all of those things are designed together to support each other, then you should be able to pull off that signature product. What we do at Flip Your Life, we have one product that we sell on Flipped Lifestyle and really, we have signature products on our other niches too. Jocelyn has her year of lesson plans, I have two products on Coach XO. I have an offseason training manual and a playbook that I sell basically.
What we do is we just keep refining those over and over, and adding to them instead of like charging more products. So definitely have a strategy for over time to be building and bulking up. That first product you launched is going to be minimum viable product. You constantly want to be adding to that product instead of chasing off new products to build that thing up to make it more and more valuable as you go.
I really like the idea of webinars for you guys because you’re good on the mike, you’re good in front of the camera, Shelley is really good at being on camera and things like that, and that’s a great environment for you to thrive in so anytime you can get 50 people in live to tell them about your product, you’re going to be in good shape. I would say this, don’t reinvent the wheel. That was a huge mistake we made in our first webinars. We were trying to have a different webinar like every month or every week for a while, just new topics.
SHELLEY: Oh wow.
SHANE: We were treating it like a podcast is what we were doing but then we stepped back and we said, “What is the real reason that we are doing this webinar? It’s to answer people’s questions and to sell x product.” So I think that you should definitely at the beginning before you plan this big sales strategy, you need to create a basic template for the webinar you want to have and then it’s just like your product, you just make that better every time.
Don’t be doing a different webinar about a different topic or different part of your book every single month. Create one template, do it. What worked, what didn’t, fix it. Have that that Q&A Session. That’s going to add the live element where things are different every time but your basic, it’s not a pitch, it’s more just the basic information should be the same for every webinar. That’s a huge mistake people make when they start doing webinars is they try to do a different one every time. It’s not a podcast, it’s not a blog post. It has a specific purpose. Focus on that purpose from the beginning.
SHELLEY: That was kind of what we were thinking is just create a presentation and really refine it, get really good at it, and potentially even be able to present the same presentation in other local venues, in churches, other places, and just really get that signature speech, so to speak, down to where it’s really refined.
JOCELYN: Exactly. I think that’s a great idea.
SHANE: I heard something the other day that was very important. Jeff Walker in his course basically says that people are trying to reinvent the wheel and they burn themselves out. What you don’t realize is that a huge proportion of your audience is always new. They’ve never heard what you had to say before.
There are going to be new people coming into your brand, people to find you randomly on Google, and even the people who have never bought from you but are in your audience, most of those people are not checking in with your brand every week. We think that if we post something we’ve already talked about before with a little bit different slant on it that everybody is going to be like, “Oh, you’ve already talked about this.” The thing is, most people are only seeing 10% of what you doing anyway. Just because you’re saying the same thing over and over in certain parts of your business, most people that come to that webinar have never heard you say that before so there’s no reason to keep doing things over and over again in a different way.
SHELLEY: Right.
JOCELYN: All right guys, I think we are just about out of time for today’s show. I hope that you picked up some clarity on some things that you were struggling with or some questions that you had. We really appreciate you guys taking the time to talk to us today.
SHANE: If you guys, anybody in the audience wanted to get in touch with you or wanted to check out your brand and see what you’re doing for authors, I know we’ve got a lot of people out there that would love to be publishing on Kindle, where can they find more information about that out?
SHELLEY: Yeah they can just come and visit me at my website, ShelleyHitz.com, that’s S-H-E-L-L-E-Y-H-I-T-Z or AuthorAudience.com will take you to the same place.
JOCELYN: Awesome. Thanks so much for taking your time to chat with us today. we really had a good time.
CJ: Thank you guys so much. We really appreciate all you’re doing just in the realm of helping business owners. I really appreciate it.
SHANE: All right guys, that wraps up our interview with Shelley and CJ. We hope you guys learned a lot about it. They are doing some great things online, got an awesome chance because they are out there and they are making it happen. They are taking action every day. If you need any more information about this podcast, you can check it out at FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast31 and if you need help with your online business, we are here for you and we’ll see you next week. Catch you on the flipside.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Shelley Hitz says
Thank you so much Shane and Jocelyn! Since our consulting call we have taken massive action and this call gave us so much motivation to move forward.
My free optin video training is now up, my first small product is DONE, and I’m planning my beta group training launch on March 1st!! 🙂
Thank you so much!
Shane Sams says
Yes! That’s what it’s all about Shelley!